Agility — the ability for a company to respond quickly and accurately to shifting market dynamics, customer expectations, and a myriad of other changes — is more important than ever in a vast, complex, and stressed global economy. IBM has taken a big step forward to help businesses achieve this flexibility with its acquisition of ILOG, a company pegged as the leading business rules management system provider by International Data Corporation.

With ILOG technology, business users can create rules that automate key decisions within their core business processes without requiring any reprogramming. Business Rule Management Systems (BRMS) provide companies with a way to automate even the most granular business decisions in a consistent manner to ensure the best response is put in play. These capabilities make it much easier for a company to react to change, automate processes and expedite time-to-market for new or updated offerings.

BRMS provides full rules management for all stakeholders from business to IT and across business rule lifecycle. The ILOG BRMS supplies a comprehensive set of tools to manage decision logic in a way that is easy, safe and predictable. Business rules and rule-based applications can be created in both Eclipse (for Java developers) and Microsoft Visual Studio (for .NET developers). ILOG BRMS integrates directly with SOA-based applications so that business rules can be implemented as decisioning services directly into BPM tools, including solutions that are part of the IBM WebSphere portfolio.

ILOG also offers optimization tools that rely on applied mathematics to help enterprises better cope with many operating constraints. This capability makes it possible for organizations to remove much of the manual work associated with setting schedules, giving businesses an automated mechanism to put the best plans in place to improve services, drive revenues, and increase profits. Businesses can also use ILOG’s visualization tools to create the rich and advanced user displays that help transform insight into action, providing an important element to facilitate collaboration for smarter role-based business decisions.

ILOG BRMS enables business and IT staff to work together in a collaborative manner to author, maintain and deploy the decision logic that is critical to business systems. The ILOG solutions put the BRMS in the hands of the business stake holders, allowing for highly personalized interactions that will drive the best possible outcome for a process in an automated environment. For example, a business analyst working for an online travel site can establish highly targeted pricing rules based on customer profile, destination, demand, inventory and even time of the day a consumer is booking a trip.

The BRMS solutions also make it possible for institutions to more effectively market products to their customers. Consider the example of a major bank in Asia that is using the rules management system to cross-sell insurance products to customers. The bank’s customer service employees can query clients using a series of questions tied to business rules that help these representatives recommend the most appropriate products.

The Bottom Line
Organizations around the world are collecting important dividends from their BRMS solutions — from improved efficiency and reduced maintenance costs to the kind of dramatic improvements in customer service that will help businesses retain and upsell existing clients. BRMS also makes it possible to support levels of automation that in the past exceeded the capacity of the human resources designated to oversee them by providing the level of reviews necessary to support accuracy.

The proof is in the numbers. One French bank slashed credit approval times from hours to minutes, achieving quantifiable benefits through effective business rules management. An insurance giant improved its underwriting straight-through processing rate to 80 percent from 17 percent, increasing new business submissions flow by 50 percent.

Some of these payoffs do much more than simply improve a company’s balance sheet. A major medical research institute used its BRMS solutions to automate its clinical trial application, recording a $1 million return on its investment, increasing productivity by 80 percent and opening the door to the kind of research advances that could potentially save lives.

The ILOG acquisition gives IBM a solution that puts important process control back in the hands of business users. By taking advantage of ILOG BRMS, companies can drive greater automation and substantial cost savings and respond correctly to fluctuating market conditions and changing client needs.

Archive of Articles by Amy Larsen DeCarlo